Pavlo Tychyna (1891-1967) is arguably the greatest Ukrainian poet of the twentieth century and has been described as a “tillerman’s Orpheus” by Ukrainian poet and literary critic Vasyl Barka. With his innovative poetics, deep spirituality and creative word play, Tychyna deserves a place among the pantheon of his European contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Osip Mandelstam. His early collections Clarinets of the Sun (1918), The Plow (1920), Instead of Sonnets and Octaves (1920), The Wind from Ukraine (1924), and his poetic cycle In the Orchestra of the Cosmos (1921) mark the pinnacle of his creativity and poetically document the emotional and spiritual toll of the Revolution of 1917 as well as the Civil War and its aftermath in Ukraine.

Tychyna coined the term “Clarinetism” to describe his earliest works, which intrinsically exhibit the clarity and the haunting sound of a clarinet. He harkens back to ancient Greek literature to form what has been called the “tragic lyric” in his short collection Instead of Sonnets and Octaves, which gives a personal, humanistic understanding to the tragic events of the Revolution. John Fizer has noted Tychyna’s close affinity with Walt Whitman’s cosmism, particularly in his cycle In the Orchestra of the Cosmos. While Tychyna in many ways displays the moral conscience of his times in his early works, later in his life he acquiesced to Soviet authorities in order to survive the horrors of Stalin’s regime. He was forced by authorities to refuse a nomination for the Nobel Prize, the only reason for which would have been his Ukrainian ethnicity.

This edition of Tychyna’s complete early works includes translations of all his major early collections as well as his poetic masterpieces “Mother was Pealing Potatoes,” “Funeral of My Friend,” and his highly patriotic “In Memory of the Thirty.” The volume includes a guest introduction by prominent Ukrainian poet Viktor Neborak.

Translated by Michael M. Naydan.

"The book contains some of the most quoted and beloved texts of modern Ukrainian literature, as well as some lesser known texts which are fundamental for a thorough understanding of Tychyna’s complex literary path. The importance of Naydan’s undertaking is thus unquestionable." Alessandro Achilli, Slavic Review

Pavlo Tychyna

Pavlo Tychyna (1891-1967) is acclaimed as one of the leading Ukrainian poets of the twentieth century. He was born in the village of Pisky in the Chernihiv region of Ukraine. He graduated from the Chernihiv Theological Seminary in 1913 and first began to publish his poetry in Ukrainian literary journals in 1912. He worked at various newspapers in Kyiv while he was enrolled at the Kyiv Commercial Institute. His first published collection Clarinets of the Sun (1918) firmly established his reputation as a new and exciting poetic voice. His subsequent early collections Instead of Sonnets and Octaves (1920), The Plow (1920), In the Orchestra of the Cosmos (1921), and Wind from Ukraine (1924) all served to document the turbulent times and aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War in Ukraine as well as the implementation of Soviet control.

Tychyna moved to Kharkiv in 1923, which at that time was a hotbed of Ukrainian literary activity. There he participated in the activities of the literary groups Hart and Vaplite (Free Academy of Proletarian Literature) with the leading Ukrainian literati of his time. He was heavily rebuked publicly for his poem “Mother Was Pealing Potatoes” (published in a Vaplite collection in 1926) and under severe pressure to conform to the Soviet regime, to which he acquiesced by writing poetry in the proscribed vein of Socialist Realism in his collections Chernihiv (1931), The PartyLeads (1934), and in all of his subsequent collections. In conforming, he managed to survive the infamous Executed Renaissance of Ukrainian culture under Stalinist repression, which ended up in killing or imprisoning several hundred of the best and the brightest of Ukrainian writers and cultural activists in the purges, many of them his close friends such as Mykola Khvylovy, who committed suicide before immanent arrest.

Tychyna was rewarded with a Stalin Prize for literature in 1941 for his poetry in support of the state and when nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature forced to reject the nomination. During World War II Tychyna focused on poetry of statement with patriotic fervor in defense of his native Ukraine from the advancing Nazi army. The apogee of his wartime poetry was the great lyrical long poem “Funeral of My Friend” (1942). Tychyna became entrenched in the Soviet bureaucracy in the Ukrainian SSR with positions in the Academy of Sciences, the Supreme Soviet, the Institute of Literature, and the Ministry of Education. The free, independent, brilliant poetry of Tychyna in his early period starkly contrasts with his poetry written in service to the Soviet regime from the 1930s until his death in Kyiv in 1967.